Emergency-Declaration Rebuke Splits Senate GOP

On Thursday afternoon, twelve Republican senators — nearly a fifth of the GOP caucus — joined Senate Democrats to pass a resolution terminating the national emergency declared by President Trump last month in an effort to unilaterally appropriate funds for construction of his long-promised border wall. The 59–41 vote was a rare bipartisan rebuke of Trump, who will now issue the first veto of his presidency in order to preserve the emergency declaration.The Senate GOP dissenters — Lamar Alexander, Roy Blunt, Susan Collins, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, and Roger Wicker— ran the ideological gamut from conservative to moderate. Most argued that the president was operating outside the rule of law, while some simply called the emergency declaration an executive overreach that Congress had a duty to stop.“Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway,” read a statement from Alexander, who plans to retire after three terms representing Tennessee rather than seek reelection next year. “The problem with this is that after a Revolutionary War against a
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